


What if Lucretia left Faerun?

by finx, NotUnprepared



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, spoilers through the end of Stolen Century
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-14 18:00:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14141478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/finx/pseuds/finx, https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotUnprepared/pseuds/NotUnprepared
Summary: Lucretia was alone for ten years. Ten years she walked through a world that couldn’t remember why it was scarred, trying to find weapons no one knew about, with no one at her side but her captain brought so low, a constant reminder of her guilt. How many times did she consider just flying the Starblaster right out of this plane and into the next one?But what if, in a moment of weakness, she did?





	What if Lucretia left Faerun?

**Author's Note:**

> We (meaning mostly finx) wrote this bad au a couple of months ago, and decided that if we’re suffering, so should everyone else. Please enjoy.
> 
> This is kind of still in draft form, but was unlikely to ever really be complete (we're both busy, and Notunprepared isn't a writer), so here it is in all its unfinished glory.

Lucretia was alone for ten years. Ten years she walked through a world that couldn’t remember why it was scarred, trying to find weapons no one knew about, with no one at her side but davenport, her captain brought so low, a constant reminder of her guilt. How many times did she consider just flying the starblaster right out of this plane and into the next one?  
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t bear to have done all of this for nothing.  
But what if, in a moment of weakness, she did?

Say it was after her time in wonderland. Say she dragged herself out of that place, twenty years older and with one measly hitpoint to her name, she got on the starblaster and she flew away, no thought in her mind except to get as far from wonderland as possible. Say she pointed the ship up, and up, until it was going higher than any ordinary ship could, leaving the prime material plane altogether.  
The starblaster can’t leave a dimension without the hunger hanging in the sky, tearing at the bonds that keep everything in place. But let’s say it could. Say Lucretia leaves the prime material plane, and everything shivers, and suddenly the ship is somewhere new.

Lucretia reforms in a glow of white light and looks across the deck of the starblaster as she hasn’t seen it in so long, with her family arrayed in front of her, dressed in red once again.  
All seven of them are brought back to the starblaster

Magnus, Merle, Taako and davenport have no idea what just happened and literally can't comprehend where they are, no matter how they try

Magnus is reaching for a weapon before he’s even fully formed. Merle barely takes longer than that to reach for his bible. Taako drapes himself nonchalantly against the railing of the starblaster, but Lucretia knows him well enough to see how he’s palmed his magic wand. They’re all trying to take stock of their surroundings, check for threats and exit routes and whatever magic brought them here, but they literally can’t comprehend what they’re looking at. They look from the ship’s helm to the bond engine to the clouds floating past, and just as they’re about to put it all together, their faces go blank, and they look again to the ship’s helm, to the bond engine, to the clouds.

Lup takes one look at Taako, her brother that she hasn’t seen in so long, and she throws her arms around his neck and starts sobbing. Taako nearly drops his wand in shock. “I've missed you so much,” She tells him, “I'm sorry i didn’t come back, i didn’t mean to leave you, god I've missed you more than breathing. And i mean that literally,” She adds, and starts to laugh through her tears.

“um,” Taako says. One hand pulls Lup closer without any conscious direction from him. The other one has his wand in a death grip. He can’t decide if he should hex this hysterical elf off him or save his spell slots for getting out of this place, whatever the fuck this place is.

Barry is the one Lucretia is most worried about. Barry knows what she did, and as threads of light weave into the shape of a man just a few steps away from her, she braces herself for an attack.  
Barry finds himself on the starblaster once more, the white glow of a reset fading from the air around him, his family reunited again, and turns to Lucretia, and sees on her face that she’s the one who brought them here. He stares at her, shocked, and then he smiles, and Lucretia can barely read all the things in that smile – pride, gratitude, sorrow, relief – before he’s turned away, and is striding across the deck.

Barry knows what she did, and Barry's not dead anymore. He doesn’t have much time. He pulls lup off of Taako and whirls her into a kiss.

He breaks away just enough to look into her eyes, and says firmly, “i love you, i have always loved you, and i will always love you.” He can feel himself forgetting why he loves her, forgetting how he knows her, forgetting her name – but he’s not afraid, this time. She’s forgetting just as fast as he is, confusion spreading across her face, but the love in her eyes doesn’t diminish, and he’s not afraid.  
“hey, aren’t you that guy from tv?” Magnus says.

Taako turns away from gaping at the romantic display going on with someone who looks disturbingly similar to him, and flashes Magnus a professional grin, all teeth. “that’s right, big guy, it’s Taako. Is this some kind of, like, a fan thing?”

Lucretia goes into fisher’s room, and collects some ichor. This is before the bureau headquarters got built, so fisher still lives permanently on the starblaster, and is on it still. Lucretia fetches a tray and cups from the kitchen, scoops out six drinks, and fights the wild urge to just run away. She puts her forehead against the cool glass of fisher’s tank. She hums a few notes, and he answers back, slow deep chimes that thrum against her skin. She takes a deep breath and goes back out to the deck.

Magnus and Lup are at the door, paralyzed with dizziness. They’d both tried to follow her, suspicious when she left suddenly, and couldn’t make it past the threshold of the ship’s entrance. Everything in front of them is static, it’s all they can do to stay upright, but they’re both too stubborn to turn away.  
Lucretia gives each of them a cup. Lup raises her eyebrows in patent disbelief, and won’t drink it even after Lucretia takes a sip to prove it’s not poisoned.

Lucretia just sighs, and goes to hand out cups to the rest of them. Barry looks at her a long moment, trying to read her face, before glancing one more time at Lup and downing it in one go. Merle sniffs it suspiciously and takes a small sip. Taako tries to surreptitiously transfigure it into something else. “don’t,” Lucretia says sharply. “and don’t give me that look,” She adds when Taako acts innocent. “if you don’t want to drink it, fine, but don’t bother faking it. It won’t work.”

She turns to davenport, and that’s when she realizes that he hasn’t left the helm. He materialized there, in a whirl of white light, facing the bright new sky, and his hands are still sure on the wheel.  
She approaches hesitantly, and taps him on the shoulder. “captain?” She hasn’t called him that in years, but here, now, dressed in red, it slips out unthinkingly. He turns to look at her, smiling beatifically. “davenport,” He says happily, and her heart twists. For a moment she’d almost thought – but no, that would make no sense. She hands him the cup, tells him to drink, and he doesn’t hesitate.

It’s a hard year. All the trust between the seven of them is just… Gone.

Magnus tells no one about raven’s roost and Julia. He lost everything, and buried the remains, and now there’s a bitterness, a hopelessness, that follows him like an echo.

Davenport is haunted by what he was reduced to. He becomes sharply standoffish as he tries to reaffirm both his authority and his sense of self. He is conscientious about the crew’s needs, but rebuffs any attempts to talk about emotions or personal problems. With Lucretia he is most formal of all. He never talks to her unless he has to, for the sake of the running of the ship. She never meets his eyes anymore; keeps her gaze downcast, calls him ‘captain’ and ‘sir’, and doesn’t talk to him unless she has to either.

Merle doesn’t trust himself anymore. He had a good life on that beach, and he ruined it all on his own. After a while he stops talking to anyone, spends his time on the deck, looking out across this new world they’ve landed on. Lucretia stands with him sometimes, and he can never decide what to say to her. He ends up saying nothing at all.

Taako doesn’t trust anyone – Lup slots herself in next to him easy as breathing, and he freezes, stiffens, tension in every inch of his body as he tries to reciprocate, tries to angle himself toward her the way he always used to know how to do, subconsciously, effortlessly.

Barry and lup are just so happy to have their family back together, and they can see how broken they all are but they can't fix them, they're both so exhausted, they've both spent ten years fighting against oblivion in one form or another. Lup spends her nights curled in Barry's arms, sobbing quietly into his shoulder. He sobs, too – he was always the lover, and every one of his loves is broken, fractured, falling apart in front of him. They want so badly to fix their family, but they’re so tired. They’ve both spent years fighting against oblivion, fighting to remain real and grounded and whole. They’re so tired. They need so badly to rest, and they can’t think of a single thing to do to fix anyone.

Davenport is haunted by what he was reduced to, and becomes sharply standoffish as he tries to parse all of that, as he tries to reaffirm both his authority and sense of self. Before the starblaster he had to always fight to be taken seriously , and these last few years he had zero personal autonomy, which brings all those feelings back to the fore

Lucretia might never do this to her family again, but the very next time they got the light, she'd grab it and run and put a barrier around the whole plane

The plane they land on this time is empty of people or animals, but is otherwise alive. But that’s not important. It’s awful. They all pull together with grim professionalism to get the light and otherwise barely speak to each other.

Taako can't even fully trust Lup, and he knows that most of them would try to stop him. So he might wait until they're alone, somehow. Wait till it's night, till even Lup has gone to sleep in Barry's arms, and then got to Lucretia's room in secret. He doesn’t kill her like that, quiet and in her sleep, but he casts a sleeping spell on her to keep her asleep, grabs her and take her down to the surface as a sort of attempt to give her a fair fight. Because this isn't about killing her, it's about making her pay, and that means a big fight, one where she suffers.

Lucretia wakes up to the vision of Taako pointing his wand at her. She starts off just taking everything Taako gives her, but he isn’t having any of that. He goads her until she starts to fight back, and it took a long time but they all have spell slots galore at this point. Eventually he pushes her so far that she puts up a shield and sat under it and cries. 

Magnus hears the explosions. He picked up a hair trigger for explosions during the raven's roost revolution. He wakes, sees what's going on, immediately and instinctively knows he has to go check it out. By the time he interrogates the feeling, he's already putting on his armor before remembering he should tell davenport and not just rush in alone

"Wake the others," Davenport snaps out when he hears what's up. "I'll get us close enough to take a look."  
Not too close, though. They can't lose the ship, can't endanger themselves  
They fly over to see what's going on - might not even notice that Lucretia and Taako are gone until they get there and see what's going on.

By the time they get close enough to see it's a wizards' duel, Lup has noticed that Taako's missing. She’s panicking, but she’s a lich, she can afford to die, so she levitates herself closer, to see. Barry goes with her, he's not gonna let her go by herself when he's just got her back. As soon as she sees who it is, she shouts into her farspeech stone to tell the others (she never had to unlearn calling for help).

Magnus is itching to jump into the fight, but he doesn’t know which side to take. He’s so. Angry at Lucretia, but she’s still his family.

Davenport makes a snap decision. He's always been good at those, always been the one who makes the final call and makes it fast - it's part of what makes him such a good captain. There's no good decision here, but he knows he has to make a decision, he knows that ten years ago he would have made it and made it quickly, he doesn't want to show weakness or indecision. That's why he acts fast, not because he’s analysed the situation or balanced the options or picked a priority. He’s lashing out rather than really deciding.

He lands the ship square in between them, stopping the fight. Although doing so damages the ship, with all the fireballs and stuff heading towards Lucretia in her bubble.

Merle is panicking. His family is fighting, falling apart in front of his eyes, and he's the peacekeeper, he's the one who's supposed to fix this sort of thing. He hasn’t seen his kids in years, he’s never going to see them again. He walked away from them and now he's on another plane and the hunger's going to eat them. He didn’t protect them, and now he can’t help this family either.

Lup makes a decision. She says a cool one-liner to Barry, and then kills herself, becoming a lich.

She strolls through Lucretia's barrier, and Lucretia is ready for a fight but Lup puts her hands up and says,  
“listen. I just spent 8 years separated from everything in existence, and it pretty much killed me. I was barely a person, and I'm not telling you this to guilt trip you, so look me in the eye while i talk to you, okay Luce? My point is, i spent 8 years connected to nothing, and i remember when i got my body back, i thought, i wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy…but maybe i would.”

And Lucretia stares, and Lup grins, and she says,  
“you think you could cast that barrier of yours around John?”


End file.
